Exportable soft-links Kibana Dashboards

[gbocchini]

Describe the feature:
Currently, Kibana Dashboards have 2 kind links:

Hard links are links that are tracked as references to other Kibana content. When you export a saved object, any content linked via a hard link is considered a related object and is exported alongside, additionally if new IDs are generated, the links are updated to point to the new IDs. Hard links include dashboard-to-dashboard drilldowns, and the new Links panel.

Soft links are text-based links, and could link to anything, not necessarily a piece of Kibana content. Soft links are not exported or updated. URL drilldowns, and links in markdown panels are both soft links.

This feature would include soft-links in exported visualizations.

Describe a specific use case for the feature:
When exporting visualizations from one Dashboard to another, it would be great to keep all references, hard and soft-links.

A verification of the validity of these links could also be included.

[elasticmachine]

Pinging @elastic/kibana-presentation (Team:Presentation)

[ThomThomson]

@gbocchini unfortunately, this change is unlikely to be made. Hard links were built specifically for the exporting use-case.

Making soft links work properly for exports would require adding logic to parse all text looking for links, determining when those links are related to a Kibana URL, then adding references for them on every save. This is untenable. The workaround is to use systems that make use of hard links instead.